Friday, October 30, 2015

You can't beat hard-wiring (genes)

As the feminist below found out. I know another mother who was herself a Tomboy (but never a feminist) and who still rarely primps, who has been puzzled to find that she has a very girly little girl. At her 4th birthday party, the little girl was wearing a plastic tiara and someone said to her, "You're a princess today". The little girl replied "I am always a princess". But that mother is amused rather than bothered as she has a sister who is very feminine. It was there in the genes all along, as it obviously was in the case below

Why do I care that my daughter's a girly girl?

My three-year-old daughter Alice is obsessed with pink and princesses. She spends most of the day pretending to be a princess (I'm the prince and I get to rescue her on my horse), or a bride (I have to propose, give her flowers and then we get married) or a mummy (there's nothing quite as humiliating as a three-year-old pretending to change your nappy [diaper] and calling you stinky).

She almost always wears pink and has as much interest in stereotypically 'boy' toys as she does in my imaginary smelly nappy.

A few days ago, she told me that boys can't wear dresses. Surprised, I told her that anyone can wear whatever they want. It made no difference: she was convinced that this was the rule and I was wrong.

Last week, when she asked me to be the prince and rescue her from the monster, I suggested she rescue me instead.

She looked at me like I had lost my mind. At this point I was rolling around on the floor crying 'Help! I've fallen off my horse!' Unmoved, she asked when we were getting married.

I'm a feminist, and I hate it when people decide a car is a toy for a boy, or a fairy outfit is for a girl. People should be able to like whatever they want and dress however they want.

I find myself making excuses for her love of pink dresses and frilly aprons. Every time she asks me to buy her a doll, I secretly cringe.

I've tried to push the princesses I think are better role models – 'Oh Belle, she's so clever and she likes reading books!' 'Isn't Elsa a strong, independent female!' I can hear myself but I can't stop.

In stories that only praise girls for being pretty and nice, I add in a bit about them being clever or interesting too.

When I decorated Alice's bedroom, she was still young enough not to care about how it looked. I bought a jungle themed duvet and covered the walls with stickers of animals and trees. This was for selfish reasons. I didn't want to spend every evening reading her bedtime stories staring into the glassy eyes of Disney princesses.

Last night came the moment I was dreading: Alice asked me to take down the animal stickers and put up pictures of princesses.

I said yes, hoping she'd forget. She hasn't forgotten. I'll put up the princess stickers and tell her it looks lovely, but really I won't like it at all.

It's not for me to tell her what she can and can't like, and it would be weird to push her to play with cars and train sets when she doesn't want to, but still. I still feel it.

Why do I feel this way? Why do I feel I have to justify her traditionally feminine tastes? Why do I think other people are judging me for having a girly girl?

I think it's because I worry people will assume I've encouraged Alice's interest in stereotypically 'female' things, as though I've told her pink is for girls and blue is for boys.

Partly it's because I don't like the message many of the older Disney stories convey – that girls are damsels in distress, waiting to be rescued by a man.

I want my daughter to be strong and to save herself. I also know this is ridiculous. She is a strong-willed, confident child. She isn't remotely submissive to anyone.

Alice's fascination with girly things looks like she is just doing what society is telling her to do, rather than making an independent decision. Yet it is her decision. So maybe as a feminist I should embrace it. She is being who she wants to be, after all.

It's no indication of what she'll be like as an adult, or even as a teenager. If she likes pink, so what?

I doubt she ever looks at one of her Barbies and feels upset that her own body doesn't match the dolls'.

I don't think she sees the doll as a mini person. It's just a thing to wear dresses and get married.

I do wonder where her interest in pink has come from, and why she is convinced that boys can't wear dresses.

At her nursery, I've seen boys in princess dresses, complete with tiaras and sparkly kitten heels. Why has she decided it's wrong?

As a feminist, I believe people shouldn't be forced to act in a certain way based on what gender they are.

It's an effort, but I'm going to embrace the pink. Maybe my younger daughter will be into monster trucks and burping contests.

A new petition at the website Change.org is asking women’s clothing store Victoria’s Secret to hire Carmen Carrera, a transgender person, to model as one of their "angels."

Carrera, 30, was born Christopher Roman. He was a reality TV star on the show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and also appeared in the Meryl Streep film “Ricky and the Flash.”

The petition has nearly 50,000 signatures. It was launched by Carrera fan Marco Regalado, who writes on the page:

"By asking Carmen to be a model, Victoria's Secret would show the entire community that they embrace trans patrons. There are so many prejudices toward the trans community, even within the LGBT community, and many trans individuals are not seen as real people. To see a transgender model walk would show that trans women are to be taken seriously and that Angels are selected because of their character and talent. As a brand, Victoria's Secret should feel comfortable marketing towards ALL types of women".

Carrera was asked about the petition by Time magazine and replied:

"I want to do this for the 50,000 people who signed the petition on Change.org. I want to do this for, of course, me and my career. I’m a show girl at heart. If I’m going to do fashion shows, this is the one to do. And I want to do it for my family. I want them to be proud of me. I want them to be like, that’s our kid, we raised that girl right there. And my community, for sure".

UN Official Warns of 'Amputation' of Christianity's DNA in the Middle East

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres expressed concern Tuesday over the exodus of Christians in the Middle East because of the conflict in Syria and Iraq.

Guterres said that speaking “as a Christian,” he was “worried about what’s happening in the Middle East.” Guterres referenced the Middle Eastern origins of Christianity and said a religious cleansing of Christians from that part of the world would be “an amputation in the DNA of Christianity and in the DNA of the Middle East.”

“Allow me to speak here also as a Christian, which I probably shouldn’t,” Guterres said at a discussion of the Syrian refugee crisis at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “I must say that I’m worried about what’s happening in the Middle East.

“People in my country, and of course I cannot mention the United States because it’s a young nation except for the populations that were here already long ago, but in my country (Portugal), people were still worshipping the trees and the rivers; and the Christians in the Middle East, in Alexandria, in Antioch, in Caesarea…they were discussing whether the Holy Ghost was coming from the Father or from the Father and the Son,” said Guterres.

“I mean that is where Christianity was born, and to see these communities at the risk of being eradicated from that area is something I consider with horror. So independently of the importance of the resettlement program, I think that the international community must do everything possible to create the conditions for these communities to be able not to be religiously cleansed, I mean from that part of the world that would be to really do an amputation in the DNA of Christianity and in the DNA of the Middle East.

“This has nothing to do with the support to individuals that need resettlement, but we need also to mobilize the efforts of the international community in order to preserve those communities that are in the very origin of Christianity as Christianity exists today,” Guterres concluded.

Pope Francis also expressed concern over the exodus of Christians from the Middle East in a meeting Monday with Chaldean Catholic bishops from the region.

“Today the situation in your lands of origin is gravely compromised by the fanatical hatred sown by terrorism, which continues to cause a great hemorrhage of faithful who leave the lands of their fathers, where they grew up firmly rooted in the furrow of tradition,” the Pope said.

“I pray that Christians will not be forced to abandon Iraq and the Middle East,” he added. “I think especially of the sons and daughters of your Church, and their rich traditions.”

THE TV NEWS was on, and there was a story about the leading candidates in the Republican presidential field. "So if Donald Trump gets the nomination," my liberal friend needled me, "are you going to vote for him?"

"He's not going to be the nominee," I said, "but I wouldn't vote for him in any case."

"What about Ben Carson?" he wanted to know.

I like what I've seen of Carson's personality and character, I replied, but I couldn't imagine backing someone so inexperienced for president. Then I added: "He'd make a great surgeon general, though!"

I meant it lightheartedly, but my companion was appalled. A surgeon general who doesn't accept Darwinian evolution? I couldn't really imagine Carson in that post, could I?

Now it was my turn to be amazed. Carson is an eminent physician and surgeon. He was a professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, and spent 29 years as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In a 2001 celebration of "researchers and doctors who are changing our world," Time magazine hailed Carson as one of America's best scientists and physicians. The Library of Congress, no less, declared him a "living legend." Surely even the most impassioned liberal couldn't argue that Carson, whatever his political or religious beliefs, would lack the scientific and medical chops to make a fine surgeon general, the nation's leading spokesman on matters of public health.

Nonsense, said my liberal friend. Someone who questions the fundamental scientific understanding of the development of life on earth would have little credibility on any scientific topic, including public health. Carson may be a great surgeon, but if he rejects such bedrock scientific findings, who knows what other well-founded data he would refuse to acknowledge?

It is certainly true that Carson denies that life developed through random, unguided genetic mutations over millions of centuries. It is also true that he believes in literal six-day creationism (though he's agnostic on the question of the planet's age) and that he attributes the rise of Darwinian thinking to the influence of "the Adversary," — i.e., Satan. Those are not mainstream views, but Carson has plainly thought about the subject and hasn't been shy about explaining his conclusions, in both religious and scientific terms.

To be sure, he is seeking the presidency, not the office of surgeon general or any other science-related position. But would Carson's views on evolution and Creation be such a red flag to Democrats if his views generally were more in line with left-wing priorities?

A trailblazing pediatric neurosurgeon, Ben Carson specialized in traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors, and congenital disorders. In 1987, he was the first to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head.

The best-known and most beloved surgeon general of all — C. Everett Koop — is remembered for his early leadership in fighting AIDS and for warning bluntly that smoking was harmful. Liberals admired him for putting public health before politics or ideology. Yet Koop, too, was skeptical of Darwinism. "It has been my conviction for many years that evolution is impossible," he wrote in a 1986 letter. Like Carson, Koop also believed that Genesis should be taken at face value, not as "something like parables." Yet those views clearly were no barrier to Koop's nonpareil service as surgeon general.

Similarly, Carson's decades of remarkable medical achievement should quell any suggestion that his biblical views about the development of life "in the beginning" have impeded his scholarship and skill at saving and improving lives in the present. All faiths (including dogmatic atheism) incorporate teachings that cannot be supported by mainstream science. Water into wine? Manna from heaven? Golden plates from an angel in New York? A universe that spontaneously created itself?

Can you regard someone's religious creed as preposterous, yet entrust the person who is faithful to that creed with public office? Of course; Americans do it all the time. I can't see Carson as president, but what I really can't see is why his religion or his doubts about evolution (neither of which I share) should even enter the conversation.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Debunking some more chapters of the Mideast ‘narrative’

There comes a time in people’s lives when they believe that they have heard it all only to discover some more proof of how far some twisted minds are willing and ready to stretch their half-baked truths, embellished version of historical events coupled with their fertile Levantine imagination in order to advance their own agenda. What is most troublesome though is that many innocent, yet intelligent minds fall prey to it and keep spreading these “narratives,” as I call them, all in the name of what is “right” “fair” and “accurate.”

It was precisely in the name of “fairness” “accuracy” and “factual history” that one of my students told me one day last week that the term “anti-Semitism” applied to all Semites and not just to Jews. It was during a heated debate following a presentation, part of an English class assignment, by another student on the rock group “Pink Floyd.” The name Roger Waters, naturally, came up and his anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist ploys were discussed

True, Jews are not the only Semites and please believe me, the term “anti-Semitism” is not one I covet when it comes to the hatred that some bear towards Jews. And yes, I have heard others, mainly Arabs composing a carefully manipulative narrative in which they claim joint-ownership and rights for the term. Sorry to confuse you with facts, dear Arabs, my fellow Semitic members of the human race. Anti-Semitism refers to the Jews and the Jews only!

Here is why.

When the German agitator, Wilhelm Marr coined the term in 1879, it was for the sole purpose to “designate the anti-Jewish campaign underway in central Europe at that time.” (http://www.britannica.com/topic/anti-Semitism)

The Arab world in itself, however, would not have been able to manufacture any “narratives,” spread them widely and successfully had it not received support and a welcoming audience from a world that feels guilty and is therefore driven by Political correctness.

The recent exaggerated worldwide response to PM Netanyahu’s description of the Jerusalem Mufti’s WWII role of advising Hitler for the best and most effective means to rid the world of Jews is a perfect example of that worldwide support.

Benjamin Netanyahu, himself the son of a very credible historian dared to refute one such “narrative,” the one diminishing the great part Arabs had in the extermination of European Jewry. True, the Jerusalem Mufti and the Arab/Muslim world may not have written “Mein Kampf” and did not actively engage in pouring the Zyklon B into the showerheads of the extermination camps but to exempt the Mufti and those he represented from any responsibility for what my parents’ generation endured is a most outrageous denial of a historical fact. This fact is recorded in the form of the transcript of the conversation between the Mufti and Hitler which Netanyahu clearly related to all and which establishes the strong alliance between Nazism and Arabism beyond any shadow of doubt.

Furthermore, Germany’s rush to claim total responsibility for the Shoah without recognizing the contributions of the Arab world for their complicity merely aids the Arabs/Muslim “narrative” and absolves Arabism from its shared goals with Nazism. What’s next, may I ask, enshrining the Mufti with the honorary title of a “Righteous Gentile?”

Another “narrative” is being woven by the Arab/ Muslim world as we speak. This one relates to the Jewish ownership of the Temple Mount. Yes, it is Jewish! And yes, it belongs to Am Yisrael as is evident by none other than the Wakf’s own admission.

The Official 1925 Supreme Moslem Council (Wakf) Guide Book to the Temple Mount proudly proclaims, on page four, paragraph two “ the Temple Mount’s inexorable connection to the Holy Temple built by King Solomon on land purchased by King David, complete with reference to II Samuel 24:25.”

Unfortunately, in this case, we, Am Yisrael, have immensely contributed to the authorship and the spread of this “narrative.” After the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel recaptured that portion of Jerusalem which was illegally occupied by Jordan since 1948, we proceeded in an ill-judged gesture of goodwill to hand over to those who wish to destroy us the keys to the holiest place of our people. Now, before anyone jumps at me, let me state I do not belong to those who call for the destruction of Al Aqsa so that we can rebuild our Temple. That is the Modus Operandi of the enemies of Israel and world civilization, not Israel’s.

Regrettably, “narratives,” Jewish ones, ones that aid, improve and even perfect the circulation of the ones created by the Arab/Muslim world are also being written by our own Jewish leaders and their blind devotees.

A few months ago, an Arab family was appallingly attacked by some terrorists. The arson attack which took place in the town of Duma in Judea and Samaria resulted in the painful death of a baby, his mother and father. The essayist of this Jewish “narrative” hastened to blame “Jewish terrorism” for the act. They declared it without any shred of solid evidence. Their “narrative,” I suspect, may have partly helped fan the flames of hatred that are currently burning Jewish lives.

As long as any side of the Middle East conflict refuses to adhere to facts only, as long as a “narrative” version of events is what dictates their policies, the chances for a long awaited Peaceful Existence in our troubled region are get slimmer and slimmer.

Report from the Synod on the Family in Rome. The Synod was convened and opened by the Pope

Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, responding to a question at today's Synod presser about the use of pastoral language, declared, "There's been a lot of emphasis on using language that doesn't offend, politically correct, if you like, language. I'm not sure that that's the best way to be prophetic."

The prelate from Durban, South Africa clarified what he meant by prophetic language, stating:

"When we look at the problems that we've been studying during this three weeks, there are two possibilities: the one is to look at it from the pastoral point of view, where you're trying to reach out to people and to administer to them. The other one which has been, I would say, has been de-emphasized at this time, even at the Synod last year, is the prophetic, where, like John the Baptist, you say you got to repent, and these are the sins and you name them as they are. I think that's the difference."

Incidentally the specific question to which Cdl. Napier — delegate president of the Synod — responded was: "If the Church abandons the phrase 'intrinsically evil' in describing homosexual sex, anal sex ... can you tell me what specific wording, if any, has been suggested for replacing the term 'intrinsically evil'?"

Polite, pastoral language is becoming more of a hot-button issue as the Synod heads to its conclusion this weeked. Many are wondering what language will be used by the 10-member drafting committee charged with preparing the Synod's final report.

To this end, Napier, the number three man at the synod, last week voiced his apprehension over the 10 members of the drafting committee, stating, "I really would share" concerns about "the choice of the people that are writing up the final document." He added, "If we're going to get a fair expression of what the Synod is about, [such as] what the Church in Africa really would like to see happening," he said, then different people should be chosen.

"We wouldn't like to see the same kind of people on that committee who were there the last time, who caused us the grief that we had," he said, referring to a controversial interim report in last year's synod with its dubious wording.

Reporting from Rome, ChurchMilitant.com's Michael Voris said of this press conference, "In one way, it was sort of the most realistic press briefing giving an account of what should be the case, what the Church should be talking about, of all the various problems besetting families."

FORMER [Australian] prime minister Tony Abbott has been accused of “embarrassing Australia” at a prestigious gathering in London, where he urged European nations to turn back refugees fleeing the war torn Middle East.

Delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London on Tuesday night, Mr Abbott warned of the “catastrophic error” Europe was making in its readiness to take in refugees from war-torn countries, offering his government’s tough boat-stopping strategy as an experience that “should be studied”.

Though the conservative crowd cheered the deposed leader, Abbott’s online audience hasn’t been so kind.

Greens Senator and asylum seeker advocate Sarah Hansen-Young was one of the first to distance herself from our former PM advocating anti-immigration message abroad. “Tony Abbott still making a fool of himself and embarrassing Australia,” she wrote on Twitter. “His obsession with pushing people in need away is beyond belief.”

And she wasn't the only one critical of Abbott’s harsh words.

Abbott’s repetition of his government’s achievements like stopping the boats and repealing the carbon tax — phrases Australians have grown tired of hearing him rattle off — were also targeted on social media.

Mr Abbott’s uncharacteristic departure from his Christian values — namely, his criticism of other Western countries’ “love thy neighbour” approach to welcoming asylum seekers — has also angered Catholic priests.

A former Bishop told Fairfax he was astounded and appalled by Abbott’s use of Bible passages to preach such a “hard-hearted” approach to refugees. “I’m ashamed that a former Australian PM would be putting out a message like this,” retired Bishop Pat Power said.

“People will make their own judgments but that’s completely at odds with what’s at the heart of Christianity. I’m certainly offended.”

In the interest of balance, news.com.au searched for, but struggled to find, praise of Mr Abbott’s speech in social media comments.

There was one positive comment from Melbourne-based Briton Antonia Mocham: “Only good thing about the Abbott speech is that no-one in Europe seems to have noticed it happened.”

Australia: The TRUTH about the fight against the proposed Bendigo mosque

The VCAT is a Human Rights tribunal

If anyone is foolish enough to believe what is being printed in our media about the outcome of the Bendigo mosque VCAT hearing last week or if anyone has any delusions that our win at VCAT was anything but a major and significant victory, let me begin by saying that had there been any opportunity for VCAT to force this mosque permit through, they most certainly would have.

The postponement of the hearing to the 23rd of February 2016 did not happen simply because VCAT President, Greg Garde was feeling benevolent toward us. It was because he had absolutely NO CHOICE.

Robert Balzola dismantled their case and they were unable to rebut his argument.

Of great significance was the complete annihilation of the Human Rights Charter argument by the lawyers acting for the Bendigo Council and those acting for the Australian Islamic Mission incorporated.

They played the discrimination card citing violations of the Human Rights Charter if the Australian Islamic Mission incorporated was denied their massive mosque in a quiet Bendigo residential area.

What they didn’t realize was that Robert Balzola is an expert on the Human Rights Charter, in particular, the Geneva Convention Human Rights Charter to which Australia is a signatory.

He pointed out that neither the City of Greater Bendigo nor the Australian Islamic Mission incorporated are covered under any Human Rights Charter because they are both corporations and not a ‘natural person’.

He told VCAT that the only person in this entire VCAT matter that was covered by the Human Rights Charter was Ms Julie Hoskin.

Robert Balzola then went on to list a raft of Human Rights violations that the City of Greater Bendigo and the Australian Islamic Mission incorporated had committed against us.

This puts a whole new slant on the conduct of the Bendigo Council toward the residents of Bendigo and potential grounds for appeal to the Human Rights Commission to bring them to account for their abuse.

Furthermore, numerous other violations and breaches of the law were raised as well as the monumentally flawed and unacceptable documents contained in the planning file for the mosque.

The performance and conduct of the council and the councilors was raised as well as the pecuniary interests of a number of current councilors in direct connection to the mosque development.

It was raised that these same councilors did not refrain from voting as they are meant to do when the mosque permit was presented for approval at the public council meeting on the 18th June 2014.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Germany's secret service warns the country 'is importing Islamic extremism, anti-Semitism, other people's ethnic conflicts and a different understanding of society'

Germany's intelligence agencies have expressed serious concerns over the huge influx of migrants harbouring extremist views, it has been reported.

A security document has warned of the damaging consequences of Berlin's open-door policy which is expected to see around one million refugees enter the country this year alone.

It read: 'We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different societal and legal understanding.'

Security sources also fear the integration of migrants 'is no longer possible' because so many already live in isolated communities.

The document, seen by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, added: 'German security agencies... will not be in the position to solve these imported security problems and thereby the arising reactions from Germany's population.'

A senior level security official also told the paper that 'the high influx of people from all parts of the world will lead to instability in our land', it was reported by The Jerusalem Post.

The official added: 'Mainstream civil society is radicalising because the majority don't want migration and they are being forced by the political elite.'

The concerns have been voiced by the four major security agencies in Germany – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Police and Federal Criminal Police Office.

Germany – which is braced for around one million asylum seekers this year – has seen a spike in violence at registration centres in recent weeks as conditions deteriorate and tempers boil over.

Over the weekend, police sprayed left-wing protesters with a water cannon to keep them apart from an anti-Islam demonstration by a far-right group in western Germany.

Some 3,500 police in full riot gear were in Cologne yesterday afternoon, sometimes stepping in to keep the two groups from fighting.

About 10,000 people - including many families waving signs reading 'refugees welcome' - were protesting the demonstration Sunday by 1,000 from a group called 'Hooligans against Salafists,' the dpa news agency reported.

The more-radical offshoot of Dresden's anti-Islam PEGIDA group had clashed with counter-protesters last year in Cologne, injuring dozens. Police have stepped up measures this year to try and prevent similar violence.

Sex attacks are also now said to be an everyday event while in one state alone there are understood to have been 100 cases of violence in just the last three months.

Some women are even reportedly being forced to become €10-a-day prostitutes, local media reported.

More than 670,000 people have reached European soil this year - many of them fleeing violence in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan - in the continent's worst migration crisis since World War II.

Slovenia's premier this weekend warned the European Union that it 'is weeks away from falling apart' if the bloc cannot agree on a plan to confront the sudden influx of refugees through the Balkans.

Nine days after Hungary's move to seal its southern border drove unprecedented migrant flows into tiny Slovenia, Prime Minister Miro Cerar sent out a dramatic call to fellow central and eastern leaders in Brussels for emergency talks.

He said: 'If we don't find a solution today, if we don't do everything we can today, then it is the end of the European Union as such. If we don't deliver concrete action, I believe Europe will start falling apart.'

Since October 17, more than 62,000 migrants have arrived in Slovenia, with some 14,000 still passing through the country on today alone.

Cerar said Croatia, which has already seen some 230,000 migrants pass through since mid-September, was still waiving migrants through into Slovenia without alerting Slovenia authorities.

Danish woman, 22, who dropped out of college to fight ISIS in Iraq has her passport confiscated by police in her homeland

A young Danish woman who dropped out of college and travelled to Iraq to fight ISIS has had her passport confiscated in Copenhagen.

Joanna Palani became famous worldwide when she declared she was leaving Denmark and heading to the Middle East to fight the terrorist group.

The 22-year-old, of Kurdish descent, is one of many Westerners to join the fight against ISIS in the Syrian city of Kobane, also known as Ayn al-Arab. Syrian Kurds in the city, assisted by Iraqi Peshmerga troops and US and Arab coalition warplanes, eventually forced hundreds of militants out of the centre of the city.

On one of her Facebook posts, she published a photograph of herself smiling while wearing military fatigues, a bulletproof vest and carrying a large assault rifle - threatening ISIS militants with the words: 'See you on the front-line tomorrow'.

With the city now being rebuilt, she returned to Denmark for a brief respite from war - but had her passport seized by police and the Danish intelligence service PET.

She said: 'They have forbidden me from leaving Denmark. That puts me in the dilemma that I cannot continue my service down there as a soldier.'

She said: 'How can I pose a threat to Denmark and other countries by being a soldier in an official army that Denmark trains and supports directly in the fight against the Islamic State?'

Minister of Justice Soren Pind told Danish national daily newspaper Berlingske over the weekend that Denmark's foreign fighter law is 'very clear' but suggested that Palani could challenge the decision in court.

Palani meanwhile has said she will appeal.

In an interview last year she said: 'I love Denmark. I grew up here and I love the freedom of our society.

'If Denmark should ever be attacked, I will go to the front-line with a Danish flag around my shoulders.

'But I have Kurdish family, and right now it is the Kurds who are being attacked by brainwashed Islamists.'

“California Bans Use of ‘Redskins’ as School Mascot or Team Name,” according to a recent headline in the Sacramento Bee. Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill implementing that prohibition statewide, apparently “without comment,” on Sunday, October 11.

According to the same newspaper story, the new law affects just four California high schools, located in Calaveras, Merced and Madera counties. The law allows those schools to “keep uniforms bearing the [supposedly offensive] name if they [were] purchased before 2017”, provided that “the school selects a new team name, mascot or nickname.”

Doesn’t California’s legislature and its governor have more important things to worry about, such as addressing chronically large public budget deficits and municipal bankruptcies caused by excessive spending and colossal unfunded liabilities in governmental employees’ excessively generous pension and healthcare programs?

The “controversy” over the Redskins’ nickname has been simmering for the past several years, originating from a small, but vocal group of members of the Oneida tribe of Native Americans, expressing outrage at the moniker of Washington, DC’s NFL football team. Dan Snyder, the franchise’s principal owner, thus far has resisted demands to change the team’s name and its widely known logos, despite a decision not very long ago by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office not to enforce his private property rights.

The controversy now has moved West in a new law sponsored by California Sen. Steve Glazer (D-Orinda), proving that if a well-organized special-interest group can express its grievances effectively in the public sphere, those grievances will be endorsed by reelection-minded politicians. California’s action on an issue that affects the nicknames of just four state high schools foreshadows indulgence of grievances on almost any other perceived wrong, no matter how trivial those “injustices” may be in the larger scheme of things.

High-school civics classes teach that our governmental representatives serve the “public’s interest.” But, California’s banning of “Redskins” supports public choice reasoning that self-interested members of the legislative and executive branches of government in fact cater to special interests. If “Redskins” is offensive, so too, in the words of my Independent Institute colleague Randy Holcombe, is “Yankees.” No end is in sight to the limits of “trigger words” to which anyone, anywhere can take offense.

To his credit, Governor Brown vetoed a bill on the same day that would have prohibited naming public buildings and roads after prominent civilian and military leaders of the “lost cause” of the Confederate States of America.

History happened. Removing Confederate symbols from state flags, knocking down statues honoring fallen Confederate soldiers, or placing a bell recognizing Martin Luther King atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain cannot erase the past. Such tactics are similar in form and substance to the aims of of ISIS, which wants to return the globe to the time of Mohammed, roughly the year 700 AD.

Unless America’s citizenry is willing to empower an Orwellian Ministry of Truth so as to expunge all uncomfortable truths, it is high time for government to stop trying to put everyone’s mind at ease.

No, the Holocaust was not Husseini’s idea. But he was a partner in perpetrating and promoting it. He also made it inevitable

Netanyahu’s assertion on Tuesday before the World Zionist Congress that the founder of the Palestinian people, Haj Amin al-Husseini, convinced Adolf Hitler to eradicate rather than expel the Jews of Europe was an overstatement of Husseini’s role.

No, the Holocaust was not Husseini’s idea. But he was a partner in perpetrating and promoting it. He also made it inevitable.

As I detailed in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, during the course of Husseini’s meeting with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, Hitler told the Arab leader of his plan to eradicate European Jewry.

Husseini told Hitler that he would support the Nazis, and rally the Arab world to their side, if Hitler agreed to two conditions: that Hitler support his bid to rule over a postwar Arab state comprised of present-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel; and that Hitler support the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry.

As both the official Nazi record and Husseini’s summary of the meeting in his diary report, Hitler accepted Husseini’s demands. And it makes sense that he did.

Husseini proved his loyalty to the Nazis long before he arrived in Berlin. His romance with them began with Hitler’s election victory in 1933. From then on, Husseini’s followers in Mandatory Palestine greeted one another with the Nazi salute. Swastikas festooned their towns. The Nazis began directly funding Husseini’s terror war against the Jews of Israel and British Mandatory officials in 1937.

In 1937, the British forced Husseini to flee the country. In 1941, he organized and incited a pro-Nazi military coup in Iraq. The British were forced to invade Iraq in response to the coup.

Husseini then fled to Rome where he met with Mussolini and went on the Berlin, where he remained for the duration of the war.

As the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini invented and shaped the Palestinian national ethos in a manner that aligned with his pathological hatred of the Jews. Rather than providing the Palestinian Arabs with a positive vision of a future state that would safeguard and cultivate them as a distinct Arab nation, he shaped Palestinian society as a wholly negative phenomenon. It was seeded in a hybrid hatred of Jews that fused Koranic hostility to Jews with racism-based annihilationist European anti-Semitism rooted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Husseini translated and published in Arabic.

The goal of Husseini’s nationalist drive was not to form a Palestinian Arab state, but to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state and to annihilate all aspects of the Jewish national liberation movement through a campaign a terror and political warfare.

Husseini’s goal of leading an Arab state that encompassed Iraq and the entire Levant shows that the founding father of the Palestinian national project did not view “Palestine” as a distinct territorial entity.

After Hitler agreed to both of Husseini’s conditions, Husseini began his active collaboration in the Nazi war effort. He participated in the Holocaust directly. In 1943, he formed the SS Handschar Division comprised of Bosnian Muslims. His troops exterminated 90 percent of Bosnia’s 14,000-member Jewish community.

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

Husseini contributed to the Holocaust indirectly.

Beginning shortly after his meeting with Hitler and extending through the end of the war, Husseini broadcast regular programs to the Arab world on Nazi short wave radio in Arabic. In those broadcasts he engendered support for the Nazis and the extermination of world Jewry. Using the mix of Islamic Jew-hatred and European annihilationist anti-Semitism he had developed in Jerusalem, Husseini cultivated a culture of support for the annihilation of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish (then nascent) state in the Land of Israel. That culture, bred through those broadcasts heard regularly by millions throughout the entire Arab world, still holds today.

Husseini was indicted as a war criminal in Nuremberg. Rather than try him, the allies allowed him to flee to Egypt in 1946. There he was greeted as a war hero by King Farouk.

It is true that Hitler didn’t need Husseini to convince him to annihilate European Jewry. By the time Husseini arrived in Germany, the Nazis had already murdered a million Jews.

But Netanyahu’s claim that Husseini made it impossible for Hitler to suffice with expelling the Jews from Europe is true. The only place that wanted the Jews of Europe was the nascent Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Through his terror war against the Jews and the British Mandatory authorities, and through his incitement of pro-Nazi sentiment in Egypt, Iraq and the Levant, Husseini convinced the British to betray their legal obligation to allow free Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel and so closed off the Jews’ last avenue of escape from Nazi-dominated Europe.

As Netanyahu said, Husseini is revered and glorified by the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat claimed that he was Husseini’s political heir and blood relative as a means of legitimizing his claim to leadership over the Palestinians.

Hamas as well has invoked Husseini as its ideological founding father.

History in hand, it is time to return to Netanyahu, and his overstatement of Husseini’s role in the Holocaust.

From the time of Husseini till today, propaganda and terror have been the Palestinians’ weapons of choice in their war against the Jews. Internally lies are spread of nonexistent Jewish plots and imaginary acts of aggression, to incite and solicit the murder of Jews. Propaganda and lies are then used to glorify the murderers as heroes and martyrs.

Externally, the Palestinians spread lies about Palestinian victimhood at the hands of bloodthirsty Jewish settlers and security forces who seek to drive the Arabs from their homes. By casting themselves as victims to the outside world, the Palestinians ensure that Israeli responses to their acts of aggression are perceived as acts of aggression, which they are fully justified in attempting to defy through murderous rampages against Jews.

The Palestinians recognize that for their terror to be acceptable to the West, they must portray themselves as guileless victims. Hence, they repeatedly insist the absurd claim that terrorists who deliberately kill Jews by running them over, are really merely victims involved in traffic accidents. The Palestinian teenage girl who this week sought to infiltrate the community of Yitzhar with a carving knife, suffers from “sleepwalking.”

These ridiculous lies are only credible in a world devoid of any historical knowledge of the Palestinians’ 95-year history of aggression against the Jews. And so the Palestinians have invented a false history of their war against Israel in which thousands of years of Jewish history is blotted out, and thousands of years of Palestinian history have been invented out of whole cloth.

In this revised version of events, Husseini has been erased from history. His role in the Holocaust has been deleted. The fact that the goal of the Palestinian national movement from its inception has been to annihilate the Jewish state and that the annihilation of Israel remains its goal still today has similarly been washed out of the history books and the news pages.

To maintain this fictional account of current and historical events, the Palestinians depend on the collaboration of the Western media.

And with each passing year, that collaboration has grown more open, expansive and shameless.

Western reporting on the events of the day now are almost entirely devoid of any relationship to reality.

Consider just a few recent examples. CNN’s report of the Palestinian arson assault on Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus on October 16 contained no mention of the fact that the fire at the holy Jewish site was set by Palestinians. In the same report, the network stated, “In the past month, eight Israelis died in 30 attacks involving knives and other weapons.”

As if fires set themselves and angry knives wander the streets.

MSNBC’s reporter Ayman Mohyeldin was caught lying two weeks ago as he claimed that the knife-wielding Palestinian terrorist in the Old City of Jerusalem who was lunging toward security personnel as they killed him, was an unarmed, innocent bystander. As Mohyeldin spewed his lies, the video of the assault that clearly showed the terrorist wielding a knife was being broadcast to his viewers.

That embarrassment didn’t stop MSNBC from maintaining the myth of Israeli aggression, however.

The next week, the network posted a graphic of British Mandatory Palestine from 1946 which it claimed was the State of Palestine in 1946. The graphic them purported to show how the Jews stole ever more Palestinian land in the years that followed. Although the network was forced to broadcast a retraction, the lie that Palestine once existed had already been told.

Then of course there was The New York Times with its stunning “background” piece purporting to provide its readers with historical context regarding the competing Israeli and Palestinian claims regarding the Temple Mount. The Times reported as fact the false claim that there is a debate among respected academics regarding whether the Jewish temples were actually located on the Temple Mount.

In other words, the Times unabashedly participated in the Palestinian project of rewriting history in a manner that erases Jewish history from the Jewish homeland.

Netanyahu recognizes that the media have sided with the Palestinians in their war to destroy Israel through a mix of terror and propaganda.

He knows that the only stories they will report on are stories with an anti-Israel angle. It is reasonable then to assume that he decided to use their embrace of every possible angle of attack as a means to get the truth out about the nature of the war.

By exaggerating Husseini’s importance in the Holocaust, Netanyahu gave the media a means of attacking him. But by doing so, he forced the Times to report on the Palestinians’ founding father’s role in destroying European Jewry and his desire to carry out the Final Solution in the Middle East. They would have ignored the issue if Netanyahu had not exaggerated his actual role.

Due to his “gaffe,” every Western media outlet reported on Husseini’s actions. Some even mentioned that in his PhD dissertation, current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said the Holocaust was both a myth and a joint Zionist-Nazi project. For most Westerners, this is the first they’ve heard of the fact that the Palestinian’s George Washington was a Nazi war criminal.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

A 'mortified' blind woman was told to leave Asda by a security guard - for bringing her guide dog into the supermarket.

Louise Cannon, 34, from Liverpool, had the run-in while doing her weekly shop with her 12-year-old niece, Abbie, and guide dog, Harmony.

The security guard told her 'no dogs, get out' and refused to listen when she desperately tried to explain it was against the law to remove her from the store. But he refused to budge and began shouting at her to leave.

Ms Cannon, a charity worker, asked the security guard to fetch the store manager, as other customers urged him to change his mind.

The store manager eventually came over and apologised, explaining how the guard was not from the UK and unaware of the law.

She was then allowed to continue with her shop at Asda in Stonycroft but was left feeling embarrassed.

Recalling the incident, she said: 'Everyone was looking at us and it was mortifying and it really was so embarrassing. 'The manager came and apologised and said that the security guard did not know the law as he was not from the UK originally.

'I can deal with that but what I can't accept is to be shouted at when I am a vulnerable women with a child. 'Security guards are supposed to protect you – not intimidate you.

'Everyone was talking about the incident when I got to the tills and I just wanted to get out of there as quick as possible.

'When I got outside I was shaking and I had to cross four lanes of traffic with the dog and my niece while I was in a traumatised state.'

Ms Cannon - who is a charity worker - tried to reason with the security guard, but he started shouting at her

She has vowed never to return to the store after she was made to feel vulnerable. 'I don't want to run into the man again and that is a massive part of my independence taken away', she said.

She went on: 'It is so stressful and demanding to get myself ready, get the harness on the dog and get my niece ready without having to deal with things like this.

'Harmony is not a fashion accessory. She is my mobility aid and is essential for me to live with a high quality of life.

'I have friends who have suffered a similar thing and it is ridiculous - it shouldn't be happening. Guide dogs are as good as gold too.'

A spokesman for Asda said the security guard in question has now been 'retrained'. He said: 'We are genuinely sorry for how the security guard on duty in our store treated this customer, it was not acceptable.

'The colleague isn't originally from the UK and wasn't familiar with guide dogs being allowed inside shops. 'He has now been retrained.'

A spokesman from the charity Guide Dogs said: 'We're always saddened when we hear about a shop, business, place or transport service refusing access to a guide dog owner.

'The Equality Act 2010 makes it illegal to deny access to a person accompanied by their assistance dog but the charity Guide Dogs still regularly receives reports from people who have been turned away because they have their guide dog with them.

'Instances like this are incredibly upsetting for the people who experience it.'

The terrorist attack in Sydney earlier this month has once more left the nation reeling, however it has apparently been deemed offensive to call it terrorism or religious extremism, with the preferred description being the more neutral “politically motivated”.

While this has frustrated some, I have come to realise that by applying such political correctness to other major events we can eliminate all death and destruction from the world.

And so, without further ado, I give you the Politically Correct Guide to History …

The politically correct control freaks are on the move and way beyond crazy. For example, political correct lemmings are so goofy they want to let terrorists and other illegal immigrants into America while attacking cumulus clouds in their wacky environmental movement war on the United States. Of all places, Philadelphia the city of brotherly love, where the Founding Fathers assembled at Independence Hall and declared freedom from British tyranny just a few years ago witnessed it’s tyrannical mayor unleash his powerful government wrath against the Boy Scouts. He threatened to boot them out of their historical national headquarters because at the time Boy Scout leaders were still holding on to the Christian principles that were the hallmark of that organization.

As surely as the world turns the politically correct freaks continue to bring their misery into the days of our lives. The political correct freaks have invaded just about every single segment of our republic. Even when it comes to the protection of our country from enemies their politically correct influence endangers our safety. So now the U.S. Justice Department according to assistant Justice Department director John Carlin is going on the muscle against domestic terrorism.

John Carlin, head of the Department of Justice national security division announced the new Domestic Terrorism Division will focus on domestic threats. He added, “In order to ensure that we are gaining the benefits of the information and input from those eyes on the ground from around the country, and in recognition of a growing number of potential domestic terrorism matters around the United States, we have created a new position to assist with our important work in combating domestic terrorism.” Carlin went on to emphasize what he called the increasing risk from homegrown terrorism and specifically white supremacy.

Carlin also pointed out “We recognize that over the past few years, more people have died in this country in attacks by domestic extremists than in attacks associated with international terrorist groups.” To put it bluntly, what a crock of politically correct garbage. First of all, this is a nation of laws. If the government would enforce the laws already on the books without politically correct influences, the government would strongly deal with enemies both foreign and domestic.

There is no logical reason for the Department of Justice to take this politically correct approach. However the government has become a rouge enforcer of globalist political correct dogma at the expense of America and the unalienable rights of “We the People.” Mr. Carlin said that the D.O.J. will specifically emphasize white supremacy. Big whoop Mr. Carlin, where was the Justice department after Louis Farrakhan spoke about the need for ten thousand brave men to kill? Where is the Justice Department when Americans are needlessly murdered by illegal immigrants let in by the federal government that has so-far refused to build proper fencing and effectively guard the American borders?

The politically correct freaks have taken over almost all of the far too many government departments in addition to the Department of Justice. It seems as if Department of Justice officials are gearing up to work in concert with Obama administration plans to bring over a United Nations inspired international police force that is supposed to go after domestic extremists. This kind of evil is in lock step the politically correct freak who prefer the rights of illegal immigrants, animals, trannies and muslims who hate all non-muslims above the unalienable rights of you and I.

The politically correct freaks don’t believe in your right of self-protection. That is one of the reasons it was easy for president Obama to announce he wanted to politicize the gun issue. To him it was more important to drum up support for taking guns from law abiding sovereign citizens than showing gratitude to Chris Mintz, who bravely tried to save others from knuckle dragging murderer. Thanks but no-thanks to politically correct freaks, it was easy for the cowardly murderer to go after people he knew would be unarmed thanks to a politically correct work environment that discourages good people from protecting themselves.

The politically correct freaks in the form a homeowners association are so ensconced in evil and stupidity, they recently turned their bigoted ire toward Donna Morey of Hatfield Pa. Why? Because she dared to fly a small blue star flag in her upstairs bedroom window in honor of her son’s military service. Ms. Morey said that she had been flying the flag for nearly a year, but recently got a call telling her that she could be running afoul of the rules, in the complex where she lives. The silly rules state that only white or off white window treatments may be visible from outside of the house. Her son Donald Morey is a major in the army who has served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the way, the Blue Star Flag is traditionally displayed by families of active servicemen and women.

Last but not least, the immoral politically correct freaks also continue to show their unyielding disdain of presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson. Simply because he, like yours truly refuses to act, speak, or believe the way that the politically correct freaks (or progressives) want him to. In other words, Dr. Carson tells the truth concerning economics, abortion, American history, etc. and God forbid, he loves America and wants to see the reestablishment of proper moral instruction. By the way, a return to good moral instruction and faith in God will go a long way in helping Americans make better choices, even at the ballot box. Something the politically correct freaks don’t want to happen.

“The wife keeps shooting down my Halloween costume ideas because she says they are too insensitive.”

“That’s too bad. Pop-culture expert Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says it is the one day of the year when almost anything goes. A day when adults can ‘do something outrageous they’d never do normally.’”

“I couldn’t agree more. It’s the only day of the year we can freely satirize our culture, but the wife is having none of it.”

“You weren’t thinking of dressing up like Caitlyn Jenner, I hope?”

“No, but I was thinking of satirizing our lousy economy by dressing up as a hobo. I was going to wear old, torn clothes, but the wife put a stop to it.”

“Because it would be rude to make fun of people who live on the streets?”

“No, because I was going to wear my regular clothes. I haven’t been able to buy new pants since the economy tanked in 2008.”

“Surely you have other satirical ideas to choose from.”

“I was going to dress up like the clock kid, who brought an allegedly homemade clock to school in a briefcase, but the wife said no way.”

“Because she thinks such a costume might offend some people?”

“No, because she doesn’t want me to disassemble our bedroom clock. Then I had the idea to mock the story about the dentist who shot Cecil the lion. I was going to dress up like a dentist with a bow and arrow and carry a pro-Planned Parenthood sign.”

“I don’t get it.”

“How can people can get so universally outraged by the trophy killing of a lion without everyone getting universally outraged by some disturbing videos of Planned Parenthood activities? Then I had an idea to dress up like a machete-wielding ISIS member, but the wife really disliked that idea.”

“ISIS is beheading Christians who won’t convert to their faith. A costume that calls attention to their horrific bloodshed would certainly be provocative.”

“Well, the wife said such a costume would make people angry at me, not the bloodshed ISIS is causing. Many people can’t bring themselves to digest the real evil ISIS is carrying out on innocent people, but it would be easy for them to find fault with me.”

“The pope recently concluded a fascinating visit to our country. I imagine some people will come up with costumes based on his visit.”

“The wife says no way am I permitted to do anything that involves religion, as there are so many people who might find that offensive.”

“Well, your wife seems to reflect the hypersensitive nature of people these days. Then again, it would be inconsiderate to dress, say, as an illegal alien or Klansman. Still, for the most part, Halloween is possibly the last bastion of freedom in America — the only day of the year people can do something that is not entirely appropriate.”

“Well, the wife isn’t going to let me do something inappropriate.”

“How about having some fun with a political figure now that the presidential campaign is heating up? Surely that is still OK?”

“I was going to dress up in a blond wig and a pantsuit, but the wife said that would be insensitive to middle-aged women like Hillary.”

“How about dressing up in a frumpy blond toupee and a suit to have some fun with Donald Trump?”

“Great suggestion. The wife says the ONLY thing Americans can still make fun of is a rich, white Republican man.”

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Some good news for press freedom in Britain, but...

... it’s still bad enough — and would be worse under Corbyn’s Labour

These are generally not the best of times for supporters of press freedom in the UK. The past four years have brought a sustained attempt to tame and sanitise Britain’s unruly, troublemaking media. So it has made a change to have two good news stories to report over the past week. First, Old Bailey jurors acquitted the last two tabloid journalists charged with paying public officials for stories. Then a Tory government minister suspended plans to impose punitive costs on publications that refuse to bow to state-backed regulation.

To recall the background. The panic that followed the 2011 phone-hacking scandal led first to Lord Justice Leveson’s official showtrial of the tabloids, and then to the politicians passing sentence. Leaders of all the political parties did a deal with the press-bashing lobby Hacked Off in 2013 to set up Britain’s first system of state-backed regulation since the end of Crown licensing of the press in 1695. They used the medieval instrument of a Royal Charter to empower the official regulator, and passed a new law threatening punitive fines and costs for publications which refused to bend the knee (which is all of them, so far).

Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service launched Britain’s biggest-ever policing operation — not against suspected jihadists, but journalists, more than 60 of whom were arrested, often in dawn raids, railroaded into court or left hanging for years on police bail.

Last week, however, that police/prosecutors’ witch-hunt suffered another major setback, when a jury issued not guilty verdicts in the trial of the last two Sun journalists charged with breaking the law by paying public officials for information, as part of the Met’s multimillion-pound Operation Elveden. The acquittal of reporter Jamie Pyatt and former news editor Chris Pharo means that, of the 34 tabloid journalists arrested and 29 charged under Operation Elveden, just two stand convicted. Only one reporter, Anthony France, has been found guilty by a jury, and he is likely to walk free on appeal (the other one pleaded guilty as part of a deal with prosecutors). The final score of Elveden trials should be Journalists 28, Witch-hunters Nil.

Jurors have refused to find reporters guilty of anything more than being journalists, for unearthing true stories which the secrecy-obsessed state wanted kept hidden. As a defence lawyer put it after last week’s not guilty verdicts, ‘They call it a crime, we call it democracy’.

Yet amid the celebrations of the imminent end of Elveden, things are still not looking great for the future of investigative journalism. Reporters’ and editors’ lives have been wasted and careers wrecked by the witch-hunt. Many of the sources of their stories have been jailed. The 2010 Bribery Act has now made it illegal to pay whistleblowers for stories. And Leveson’s proposals to tighten the restrictions of journalists’ contacts with police and use of data threaten to make matters worse. There is much more to be done if we hope to break through what one editor has called an ‘ice age’ of investigative journalism and get at the truths the authorities don’t want the public to hear.

The other good news came on Monday at the London conference of the Society of Editors. Giving the keynote address, the Conservative culture secretary, John Whittingdale, announced that he was presently ‘not minded’ to introduce the punitive system of costs against newspapers that refuse to sign up to a regulator backed by the Royal Charter. Cue much relief among the press corps, and consternation among the anti-press crusaders.

Under the Crime and Courts Act 2013, publications which join a press regulator recognised by the politicians’ Royal Charter will be offered an arbitration service and some protection against being sued by complainants. Those which fail to sign up to the state-backed regulator, however, would face the prospect of having to pay the costs for both sides in any civil court case, even if they won! As we argued on spiked from the first, if this was supposed to be ‘carrot’ to newspapers, it was one shaped like a baseball bat with a nail banged through the end. The threat of crippling costs for dissenters could effectively make membership compulsory for many, especially hard-pressed local news outlets.

With the recognition of a regulator under the Royal Charter drawing closer, it had seemed the new regime of punitive costs would soon start to bite. However, secretary of state Whittingdale has now said he feels it would be wrong to sign the new rules into effect. That threat at least appears to have been lifted for now.

This is welcome news. But it does not go nearly far enough. The culture secretary has indicated that he is still willing to accept the new law’s other potentially punitive measures against dissident publishers, that of ‘exemplary damages’ in libel and other civil cases. The bar for imposing such million-pound damages appears to have been set quite high – publications would have to show ‘deliberate or reckless disregard of an outrageous nature for claimant’s rights’. But it would still be up to m’lud to decide, and as Press Gazette editor Dominic Ponsford observed, ‘what a judge considers outrageous could well be fairly mild by the standards of a tabloid editor’.

In the same speech, Whittingdale also made it ‘very clear’ that the government still supports a state-backed regulator, and wants ‘to see the press bring themselves within the Royal Charter’s scheme of recognition’. Yet, with or without punitive costs and fines, the prospect of state involvement in the regulation of the press casts a long shadow over press freedom in the UK.

(Most major press groups are currently regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation – IPSO – which refuses to sign up to the Royal Charter. Others, including the Guardian, Independent and Financial Times, are effectively regulating themselves.)

Days before Whittingdale made his announcement, a new report, Leveson’s Illiberal Legacy, produced by the group 89up and sponsored by major news publishers, put a strong case against the acceptance of state-backed regulation. It begins by noting that, in January 2014, the World Association of Newspapers felt moved to make its first inspection visit to the UK in its history.

More used to investigating the lack of press freedom in undemocratic states, the WAN delegates were ‘plainly appalled’ by what they now saw happening in the historic heartland of press freedom. Their damning report described the Royal Charter as ‘a fundamental shift… from the principle of zero involvement of politicians in press regulation’. That principle will be in ruins so long as the Royal Charter or any other legal intrusion remains.

Even now, the non-state regulator IPSO appears far too close to Leveson’s idea of a strict policeman determined to prevent the press from running ‘too free’. I have described it as looking more like the Independent Press Sanitisation Outfit.

But however qualified the recent good news might be, we can be sure things would be far worse were the Labour Party now in power. Labour went into the 2015 General Election pledging to impose Leveson’s constraints on press freedom in full if they won. That was rejected by voters, along with the rest of Ed Miliband’s manifesto. Now there is an apparent wave of radical enthusiasm for the new Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet Corbyn, the veteran state socialist, is one of the most implacable enemies of a free press in UK politics, without a freedom-loving hair in his beard, who has lost no time in trying to blame the media for many of Labour’s and Britain’s problems.

As Professor Tim Luckhurst points out in his foreword to Leveson’s Illiberal Legacy, the moving forces in Hacked Off (behind the human shields of phone-hacking victims) include longstanding anti-free-press lobbies such as the Media Reform Coalition, ‘which proudly proclaims the support of Jeremy Corbyn’. These groups produced its Manifesto for Media Reform in run up to the May General Election.

As my book Trigger Warning points out, their manifesto’s ‘ostensible aim is to make the media “more accountable and more responsive to the public they serve”. Yet the only way these media activists can envisage that is through more state intervention and control… Never mind that freedom nonsense, they demand that “communications should be organised and regulated in the public interest”. The question such committee-speak always raises is: who is going to do the organising and regulating, and who will decide what we mean by the public interest? And the answer is: not the public.’

Instead the illiberal left wants more powers for Ofcom, the government’s regulatory quango, and demands that ‘the nations of the UK through their elected assemblies should be granted greater powers over the regulation of the media’. This, Trigger Warning concludes, is ‘basically a coded way of calling for greater political control, something that defenders of freedom of speech and of the press have fought against for 500-odd years’.

Despite the recent good news, defenders of press freedom have plenty of battles still to fight; but we also have reason to be pleased that Corbyn’s Labour has its hands nowhere near the levers of state power.

Reducing poverty is not just about people having more money’, says Ryan Shorthouse, director of Bright Blue, the ‘pressure group for liberal conservatism’. But can the solution really be giving people less money, and, instead, forcing them to make more friends?

Shorthouse’s new report, with the catchy title Reducing Poverty by Promoting More Diverse Social Networks for Disadvantaged People from Ethnic Minority Groups, has hit the headlines because of its proposal to remove child benefit from parents who fail to enrol their children in ‘quality pre-school education’.

‘All parents should know that formal childcare, as delivered through the Early Years Free Entitlement, is primarily an educational rather than a childcare service’, intones Shorthouse. ‘Even if parents are, admirably, caring for their young children at home, they should be expected to enrol their children in quality pre-school education for the free hours they are entitled to from the age of three, and from the age of two for the most deprived parents.’

Don’t be distracted by the word ‘admirably’. What it means, in this context, is ‘stupidly’, ‘irresponsibly’ or ‘anti-socially’. Shorthouse insists that, in order to reduce poverty, parents need to be forced to use a ‘relationship-based approach’ to solve the problem of having no money. This means having a relationship with the state (via pre-school education), and other people (via their encounters with ‘diverse social networks’). Furthermore, institutions such as nurseries, Sure Start children’s centres and primary schools should be monitored by the education regulator Ofsted, to ‘ensure these institutions attract families from wider socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds’.

As Shorthouse’s think-tank is so unapologetically called Bright Blue, there might be a temptation to pass this off as yet another nasty Tory policy, designed to penalise and stigmatise poor parents because they are poor. But what is interesting is how closely the report is modelled on the ideas behind Sure Start, the flagship childcare initiative pushed through by the Labour government of 1997-2010. These ideas can be boiled down to three central assertions:

1) That the problem is not poverty, but ‘social exclusion’;

2) That the solution is not money, but ‘social capital’;

3) That being middle class is a set of behaviours that can be ‘passed on’ like an infection, if only people are forced into a relationship with one another.

Ten years ago, I wrote that the aim of Sure Start was not to solve the problem of child poverty, but to broker a new relationship between the therapeutic state and the vulnerable, dependent family, whose privacy and autonomy are quietly eroded under the banner of ‘supporting parents as parents’. On this front, the project was hugely successful. By promoting the idea that the problem facing children from low-income families was primarily a parenting deficit, emanating from ‘chaotic’ home environments, the solution was conceptualised as the need to promote ‘warmer’ parenting styles that could be learned from contact with the professionals running Sure Start centres and absorbed from middle-class parents who might come along for some tea and sympathy.

This idea has galloped ahead under the Conservative government, which has promoted aggressive ‘early intervention’ policies, focusing on pre-school education as a way of getting children away from the wrong kind of influences (their parents) and into contact with the ‘right’ ways of thinking. Early intervention aims to ‘forestall many persistent social problems and end their transmission from one generation to the next’, stated the influential 2011 Allen report, Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings.

The report covered ‘a range of tried and tested policies for the first three years of children’s lives to give them the essential social and emotional security they need for the rest of their lives’. Making sure to cover all grounds, the report included policies for when children are older, to help them meet ‘the challenge of becoming good parents to their own children’.

In this reconceptualisation of poverty as a problem of parenting behaviour, social disadvantage became ‘social exclusion’ – a psychological state that could be remedied by contact with official channels and approved social networks. The Centre for Social Justice, set up by the government’s work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, developed this idea further, through promoting the concept of the five ‘pathways to poverty’ – family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addiction.

Meanwhile, the idea of poverty as social exclusion forms the centrepiece of Shorthouse’s report – only this time it is couched in the language of ‘social capital’. Initiatives designed to promote ‘social capital’ were also beloved of the previous Labour government, because they provided a new vocabulary for social engineering. The idea being that people who have the right kind of networks will be more inclined to behave in the right kind of way, and will therefore be able to become like a middle-class person (even if they have no money). Shorthouse’s report spells out what this means.

Noting that it has been found that ‘[h]aving two or more close friends is associated with lower likelihood of being in poverty’, the report argues that ‘strong social networks’ are ‘especially important for people in poverty’, as they might not be able to afford childcare, for example, but can ask a mate to help out.

But, the report argues, if poor people are only friends with other poor people, this isn’t good either. What poor people need are ‘diverse’ social networks that, for example, ‘provide essential motivation and contacts for those starting a new business’ – as well as being able to help with overcoming language problems, avoiding debt, or increasing ‘knowledge of healthy practices’. This is particularly the case for ‘disadvantaged people from ethnic minority backgrounds’.

In this way, friendships and other informal networks are stripped to an instrumental core. The role of friends and acquaintances is presented as teaching poor people how to behave like better-off people, and the role of public services is to monitor and, where possible, enforce this engagement with ‘diverse networks’.

Shorthouse grudgingly acknowledges that ‘the formation of relationships depends on individuals’. But the fact that he is even calling on the government to find ‘policies to strengthen and, in particular, diversify people’s relationships’ indicates that he doesn’t see individuals as having very much say in the matter at all.

Is the Australian Liberty Alliance an indication that multiculturalism is now under threat?

THE launch of an anti-Islam party in Australia has raised concerns about whether multiculturalism actually works.

Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders launched the Australian Liberty Alliance in Perth this week, promising to stop the Islamisation of Australia, as extremist groups like Islamic State stoke fears of terrorism and distrust within the community.

It’s not a unique development with Mr Wilders noting that “like-minded parties” were enjoying great success in Austria, Sweden, France and Switzerland.

Even in Germany, where many were recently pictured welcoming an influx of refugees from places like Syria and Iraq, there were fears of a far right resurgence in response.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has seen her approval rating drop to its lowest level since 2011 and there have been attacks on places housing refugees. A recent anti-immigration rally in the country attracted up to 20,000 people.

Earlier this year a headline in Germany’s weekly newspaper Der Spiegel asked the question: “Is the ugly German back?”

Australians could be asking the same question of themselves as anti-Islamic sentiment sees the re-emergence of divisive figures like Pauline Hanson. A recent Facebook post from the One Nation leader opposing “mosques, Sharia law, halal certification and Muslim refugees” was shared more than 25,000 times in just two days.

But despite the apparent growing public backlash, experts believe organisations like ALA will continue to appeal to just a small number of people, and that multiculturalism still enjoys wide support, especially in Australia.

“There will always be a segment of the community that is not happy with change,” Professor Andrew Markus told news.com.au

“We shouldn’t be surprised that there is a group in Australia opposed to cultural diversity and immigration but what makes Australia different is that the size of that minority is very small.”

Prof Markus of Monash University has been tracking changes in Australian attitudes towards immigrants and asylum seekers since 2007 as part of the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion Project. He said the last two surveys showed strong support for multiculturalism.

When asked whether multiculturalism was good for Australia, 84 per cent of Australians surveyed in 2013 agreed that it was, and 85 per cent agreed in 2014.

“It’s quite an amazing number and was consistent across Australia, it was hard to find anywhere in Australia, including those in rural areas, where support dropped much below 75 per cent,” Prof Markus said.

But the situation in Europe or even America was very different.

Prof Markus said a British study found 75 per cent its population wanted immigration reduced in 2014 but a comparable study in Australia found only 35 per cent believed immigration was too high.

Prof Markus said Australians saw multiculturalism as being good for the economy and for the integration of immigrants. “I think people understand and accept it’s who we are,” he said, adding that 45 per cent of the population had at least one parent born overseas.

He said he would be surprised ALA got much traction within the community, and this could also be a sign of the times.

“This country has undergone very significant change over the course of a generation,” Prof Markus said. “Young people today have grown up in a world very different to their parents,” and their attitude towards immigration or cultural diversity is likely to be “it’s life, this is it, get on with it”.

While this was not true for everybody, Prof Markus said the issues that were significant for their parents were not as prominent for their children.

Even though groups such as One Nation had managed to gain support in the 1990s, Prof Markus said that was 20 years ago and there had been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

“At its peak it got 22 per cent of the vote in the Queensland state election and since that time (leader) Pauline Hanson has struggled to get even one tenth of that,” he said.

UNSW Associate Professor Geoffrey Brahm Levey, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Political Science, agrees that parties like the ALA only appeal to a small number of people, but he acknowledged that the group did reflect genuine concerns.

“There is a genuine problem within the Islamic and Muslim community with radicalisation ... and that naturally provokes anxiety among populations,” Prof Levey said.

“People are right to be concerned when they see members of the public act violently or unacceptably but the problem is a relatively small one.”

He said the overwhelming majority of the 300,000 plus Muslims in Australia had integrated into the community.

Asylum seekers are increasingly using tactics such as hunger strikes, lawsuits and threats of violence in efforts to force German authorities to comply with an ever-growing list of demands.

Many migrants, unhappy with living conditions in German refugee shelters, are demanding that they immediately be given their own homes or apartments. Others are angry that German bureaucrats are taking too long to process their asylum applications. Still others are upset over delays in obtaining social welfare payments.

Although most asylum seekers in Germany have a roof over their head, and receive three hot meals a day, as well as free clothing and healthcare, many are demanding: more money, more comfortable beds, more hot water, more ethnic food, more recreational facilities, more privacy — and, of course, their own homes.

Germany will receive as many as 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015, including 920,000 in the last quarter of 2015 alone, according to government estimates. This figure is nearly double the previous estimate, from August, which was 800,000 for all of 2015. By comparison, Germany received 202,000 asylum seekers in all of 2014.

With refugee shelters across the country already filled to capacity, and more than 10,000 new migrants entering Germany every day, Germany is straining to care for all the newcomers, many of whom are proving to be ungrateful and impatient guests.

In Berlin, 20 asylum seekers sued the State Agency for Health and Social Welfare (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales, Lageso) in an effort to force local authorities to speed up their welfare payments.

Berlin expects to receive 50,000 asylum seekers in 2015. German taxpayers will spend 600 million euros ($680 million) this year to pay for their upkeep.

Also in Berlin, more than 40 migrants, mostly from Pakistan, seized control over the observation deck of the city's television tower and demanded stays of deportation, jobs, and exemptions from mandatory residence (Residenzpflicht), a legal requirement that asylum seekers reside within certain boundaries defined by local immigration authorities. More than 100 police were deployed to the tower to remove the protesters. After a brief questioning, they were set free. Police said no crime had been committed because the migrants had purchased tickets to the observation deck, some 200 meters (650 feet) above the Berlin.

In the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, more than 400 migrants, mostly from Africa, occupied an abandoned school because they no longer wanted to live in tents in a nearby square. When 900 police arrived to clear the building, some migrants poured gasoline inside the structure and threatened to set themselves on fire, while others threatened to jump off the roof of the building. "We are currently negotiating with local authorities about how to proceed," a Sudanese migrant named Mohammed said. "We will not leave until our demands [amending German asylum laws so they can remain in the country] are met."

In Dortmund, 125 migrants complained about the "catastrophic conditions" at the Brügmann sports facility, which now serves as a refugee shelter. The list of complaints included: bad food, uncomfortable beds and not enough showers.

Just hours after arriving in Fuldatal, 40 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria complained about conditions at a refugee shelter there and demanded that they be given their own homes. The regional refugee coordinator, Hans-Joachim Ulrich, said that migrants are coming to Germany with unrealistic expectations. "Human traffickers and the media in their home countries are making promises that do not correspond with reality," he said.

In Hamburg, more than 70 asylum seekers went on a hunger strike in an effort to pressure local authorities to provide them with better housing. "We are on a hunger strike," said Syrian refugee Awad Arbaakeat. "The city lied to us. We were shocked when we arrived here." The migrants said they were angry they were being asked to sleep in a huge warehouse rather than in private apartments. Hamburg officials say there are no more vacant apartments in the city, the second-largest in Germany.

Also in Hamburg, more than 100 migrants gathered in front of the city hall to protest the lack of heating in their tent shelters. City officials said they were caught off guard by the early frost and that all tents would have heating before the winter sets in. According to Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholtz, some 3,600 migrants would be spending the coming winter in tents due to the lack of alternative housing in the city.

According to Hamburg officials, 35,021 migrants arrived in the city during the first nine months of 2015. During this same period, Hamburg police were dispatched to the city's refugee shelters more than 1,000 times, including 81 times to break up mass brawls, 93 times to investigate physical and sexual assaults, and 28 times to prevent migrants from committing suicide.

Meanwhile, a confidential document that was leaked to the German newspaper Bild reveals that the Hamburg transit authority (Hamburger Verkehrsverbund, HVV) has ordered ticket inspectors to "look the other way" whenever they encounter migrants who are using public transportation without a ticket. The move ostensibly aims to protect the HVV against "bad press."

According to the leaked document, ticket inspectors should be lenient with asylum seekers because many migrants are "the victims of professional counterfeit ticket scammers" and many others have "barely comprehensible knowledge" of the HVV's tariff structure.

The CDU's transportation expert, Dennis Thering, said the HVV's policy cannot be left unchallenged. "This 'look-the-other-way' policy must be withdrawn. In Hamburg there is the opportunity to purchase discounted HVV tickets, explicitly also for persons who receive benefits under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act." Every newly arrived refugee receives 149 euros in pocket money every month. This includes 25.15 euros that have been earmarked for the purchase of transport tickets.

In Halle, four security guards were injured when they tried to stop a mob of asylum seekers from Africa and Syria from entering the city's social welfare office before opening hours. The migrants, who were there to pick up their welfare payments, became angry when it appeared to them as though some migrants cut in front of the line. It later turned out that some migrants were there for other business, and thus were not required to stand in line.

In Munich, 30 migrants went on a hunger strike to protest shared accommodations in refugee shelters. Two of the men were rushed to the hospital after losing consciousness. "A constitutional state cannot allow itself to be blackmailed," Bavarian politician Marcel Huber said. "We have zero tolerance for this action."

In Nürnberg, six migrants from Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Iran went on a hunger strike to protest the rejection of their asylum applications. The men, who are living in a tent in downtown Nürnberg for several months, demanded to speak to local authorities. The asylum applications were rejected six years ago, but the men are still living in Germany.

In Osnabrück, an asylum seeker from Somalia successfully sued the German Agency for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) for taking too long to process his application. A judge ordered the BAMF to make a decision on his application within three months or provide him with financial compensation.

The man said he had been waiting for 16 months to get an answer from the BAMF. In its defense, the BAMF said it currently has a backlog of 250,000 unprocessed applications, and this number is expected to skyrocket as more asylum seekers arrive in Germany.

A spokesperson for the court said the ruling set a precedent, and that many more asylum seekers likely would file lawsuits against the BAMF in the near future.

Groups of migrants across Germany have been launching hunger strikes, demanding more money, more comfortable beds, more hot water, more ethnic food, more recreational facilities, and their own homes. In Berlin (right), 900 police were needed to remove more than 400 migrants who had occupied an abandoned school.

In Walldorf, a town in the state of Baden-Württemberg, a group of migrants demanded that local authorities immediately provide them with private apartments because they were tired of living in a refugee shelter with 200 other asylum seekers. The leader of the group, a 46-year-old refugee from Syria, said he expected more from Germany. It was high time for Germans to begin to "treat us like human beings," he said.

Following up on the complaints, state and local authorities inspected the shelter and found that conditions there were "absolutely acceptable," with cubicles for privacy and plenty of food and clothing.

In Wetzlar, a city in the state of Hesse, migrants threatened to go on a hunger strike in an effort to force local authorities to move them into permanent housing. Local authorities said they delays were due to a quarantine after several migrants were found to be infected with Hepatitis A.

In Zweibrücken, 50 asylum seekers from Syria went on a hunger strike to protest the slow pace of the application approval process. "We can accept the living conditions in the refugee camp, but we need hope," one of the men said. Local officials said the process has collapsed because of the large number of applicants.

Asylum seekers have also gone on hunger strikes in Birkenfeld, Böhlen, Gelsenkirchen, Hannover, Walheim, and Wittenberg.

Meanwhile, teachers at Gemeinschaftsschule St. Jürgen, a grade school in the northern German city of Lübeck, ordered eighth graders to spend a morning at a local refugee shelter and "actively help" the migrants by making their beds, sorting their clothing and working in the kitchen.

Some parents complained that their children are also being asked to bring gifts and food for the migrants, who are already receiving handouts financed by German taxpayers. A woman wrote: "Sometimes I do not even know how I am going to put food on my own table."

Another woman wrote: "This is going too far. Students are supposed to make beds and do cleaning work at a refugee shelter. My friend's 14-year-old son is being asked to do this!!! I am not an agitator and I am tolerant, but this is going way too far. Is there now a new course in Lübeck schools called: Slavery???

The school's principal, Stefan Pabst, said the negative reaction was a "catastrophe." He said that having the children work in a refugee shelter was the best way for them to "understand social behavior." The German newsmagazine, Stern, complained that the dissenting parents belong to "rightwing circles" and are "spreading their stupid slogans."

In Bad Kreuznach, a family of asylum seekers from Syria made an appointment to view a four-room rental property but refused to see the house because the real estate agent was female. According to real estate agent Aline Kern:

"One of the men, who spoke broken German, said they were not interested in viewing the property because I am a woman, I am blonde, and because I looked the men into their eyes. This was inappropriate. My company should send a man to show the property.

"I was taken aback. You want to help and then are sent away, unwanted in your own country."

In Idar-Oberstein, a town in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, an imam at a refugee shelter refused to shake the hand of Julia Klöckner, a visiting dignitary, because she is a woman. After Klöckner, the vice-chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), shared her experience with the German newsmagazine Focus, she received more than 800 emails from women across the country describing how they, too, have been mistreated by Muslim migrants.

Klöckner is now calling for Germany to pass a new law that requires migrants and refugees to integrate into German society. She said: "We need an integration law. We are a liberal and free country. If we give up the foundations of our liberality, we will wake up in a different country."

Klöckner insists that migrants must be informed about German "rules of the game" from the first day they arrive in the country. "The people who want to stay here must, from the first day, accept and learn that in this country religions coexist peacefully and that we cannot use force to resolve conflicts," she said.

One woman described how Muslim men repeatedly cut in front of her at the supermarket checkout line. "Twice while shopping at a German supermarket I was shown that I am a second-class citizen," she wrote. In one instance, an adult Muslim male with a full shopping cart cut in front of her. In broken German he said: "I man. You woman. I go first." In another instance, a young Muslim male elbowed the woman while cutting in front of her. "When I said that I would let him go ahead of me if he asked me for permission, I was instructed by his sister that boys do not need to ask, they just demand."

A teacher at a vocational school wrote: "The most problematic students are Muslim males, who do not acknowledge the authority of female teachers and who disrupt the classes."

A mother reported that during a visit to her daughter's school, she approached a fully-veiled female refugee and asked her if she could be of help to her. "A man with a fancy suit and a three-day beard, he seemed like out of a Hugo Boss fashion magazine, said: 'My wife does not speak the language of the unclean.' When I asked him who here was unclean, he said I was. I asked him what that means. He said it was nothing against me personally, because all German women are unclean, and that his wife should not speak the language of the unclean, so that she can remain clean."

In Berlin, more than 150 migrant youths from North Africa and Eastern Europe are occupied as full-time purse-snatchers and pick-pockets. Also known as the klau-kids (thief kids), they post their gains (smart phones, laptops, designer sunglasses) on the Internet, presumably to taunt the police. A 16-year-old known as Ismat O. has been detained more than 20 times on suspicion of theft, but each time he has been released. Walid K. has been arrested more than 10 times, and also freed.

According to the director of Berlin's police union, Bodo Pfalzgraf, "it is incomprehensible that such serial offenders do not remain in pre-trial detention." Police say the youths are released because German judges are not prepared to issue arrested warrants for so-called petty crimes such as purse-snatching. Meanwhile, youths can only be deported if they have been sentenced to at least three years in prison.

In Bavaria, the Munich Chamber of Trade (Handwerkskammer München und Oberbayern) reported that 70% of migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria who have been offered apprenticeships fail to complete them. The normal dropout rate is 25%. According to the director of the chamber, Lothar Semper, many young migrants believe apprenticeships are beneath them. "We have to make a tremendous effort to convince young people that they should even begin an apprenticeship," he said. "Many have the expectation of quickly earning a lot of money in Germany."

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

Background

The most beautiful woman in the world? I think she was. Yes: It's Agnetha Fältskog

A beautiful baby is king -- with blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. How incorrect can you get?

Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair

Enough said

A face of Leftist hate: Cory Booker, (D-NJ)

There really is an actress named Donna Air. She seems a pleasant enough woman, though

What feminism has wrought:

There's actually some wisdom there. The dreamy lady says she is holding out for someone who meets her standards. The other lady reasonably replies "There's nobody there". Standards can be unrealistically high and feminists have laboured mightily to make them so

Some bright spark occasionally decides that Leftism is feminine and conservatism is masculine. That totally misses the point. If true, how come the vote in American presidential elections usually shows something close to a 50/50 split between men and women? And in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump won 53 percent of white women, despite allegations focused on his past treatment of some women.

Political correctness is Fascism pretending to be manners

Political Correctness is as big a threat to free speech as Communism and Fascism. All 3 were/are socialist.

The problem with minorities is not race but culture. For instance, many American black males fit in well with the majority culture. They go to college, work legally for their living, marry and support the mother of their children, go to church, abstain from crime and are considerate towards others. Who could reasonably object to such people? It is people who subscribe to minority cultures -- black, Latino or Muslim -- who can give rise to concern. If antisocial attitudes and/or behaviour become pervasive among a group, however, policies may reasonably devised to deal with that group as a whole

Black lives DON'T matter -- to other blacks. The leading cause of death among young black males is attack by other young black males

Leftist logic: There are allegedly no distinctions between groups of humans, yet we're still supposed to celebrate diversity.

Identity politics is a form of racism

'White Privilege'. .. Oh yes. .. That was abundant in the Irish potato famines. ... And in the Scottish Highland Clearances. ...And in transportations to Australia. ... And in Workhouses. ... 'White privilege' was absolutely RIFE!

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves. Leftist motivations are fundamentally Fascist. They want to "fundamentally transform" the lives of their fellow citizens, which is as authoritarian as you can get. We saw where it led in Russia and China. The "compassion" that Leftists parade is just a cloak for their ghastly real motivations

Occasionally I put up on this blog complaints about the privileged position of homosexuals in today's world. I look forward to the day when the pendulum swings back and homosexuals are treated as equals before the law. To a simple Leftist mind, that makes me "homophobic", even though I have no fear of any kind of homosexuals.

But I thought it might be useful for me to point out a few things. For a start, I am not unwise enough to say that some of my best friends are homosexual. None are, in fact. Though there are two homosexuals in my normal social circle whom I get on well with and whom I think well of.

Of possible relevance: My late sister was a homosexual; I loved Liberace's sense of humour and I thought that Robert Helpmann was marvellous as Don Quixote in the Nureyev ballet of that name.

One may say that the person who gets in trouble with drugs is just as dumb without them

I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.

I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take children away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass

The genetics of crime: I have been pointing out for some time the evidence that there is a substantial genetic element in criminality. Some people are born bad. See here, here, here, here (DOI: 10.1111/jcpp.12581) and here, for instance"

Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"

Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

So why do Leftists say "There is no such thing as right and wrong" when backed into a rhetorical corner? They say it because that is the predominant conclusion of analytic philosophers. And, as Keynes said: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”

Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".

One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.

A modern feminist complains: "We are so far from “having it all” that “we barely even have a slice of the pie, which we probably baked ourselves while sobbing into the pastry at 4am”."

Patriotism does NOT in general go with hostilty towards others. See e.g. here and here and even here ("Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: A Cross-Cultural Study" by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan. In Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 5, December 2001).

The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin

"An objection I hear frequently is: ‘Why should we tolerate intolerance?’ The assumption is that tolerating views that you don’t agree with is like a gift, an act of kindness. It suggests we’re doing people a favour by tolerating their view. My argument is that tolerance is vital to us, to you and I, because it’s actually the presupposition of all our freedoms. You cannot be free in any meaningful sense unless there is a recognition that we are free to act on our beliefs, we’re free to think what we want and express ourselves freely. Unless we have that freedom, all those other freedoms that we have on paper mean nothing" -- SOURCE

Although it is a popular traditional chant, the "Kol Nidre" should be abandoned by modern Jewish congregations. It was totally understandable where it originated in the Middle Ages but is morally obnoxious in the modern world and vivid "proof" of all sorts of antisemitic stereotypes

What the Bible says about homosexuality:

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; It is abomination" -- Lev. 18:22

In his great diatribe against the pagan Romans, the apostle Paul included homosexuality among their sins:

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.... Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" -- Romans 1:26,27,32.

So churches that condone homosexuality are clearly post-Christian

Although I am an atheist, I have great respect for the wisdom of ancient times as collected in the Bible. And its condemnation of homosexuality makes considerable sense to me. In an era when family values are under constant assault, such a return to the basics could be helpful. Nonetheless, I approve of St. Paul's advice in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans that it is for God to punish them, not us. In secular terms, homosexuality between consenting adults in private should not be penalized but nor should it be promoted or praised. In Christian terms, "Gay pride" is of the Devil

The homosexuals of Gibeah (Judges 19 & 20) set in train a series of events which brought down great wrath and destruction on their tribe. The tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out when it would not disown its homosexuals. Are we seeing a related process in the woes presently being experienced by the amoral Western world? Note that there was one Western country that was not affected by the global financial crisis and subsequently had no debt problems: Australia. In September 2012 the Australian federal parliament considered a bill to implement homosexual marriage. It was rejected by a large majority -- including members from both major political parties. The tide turned in 2017, however, with a public vote authorizing homosexual marriage in Australia

Religion is deeply human. The recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe suggest that it was religion not farming that gave birth to civilization. Early civilizations were at any rate all very religious. Atheism is mainly a very modern development and is even now very much a minority opinion

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

I think it's not unreasonable to see Islam as the religion of the Devil. Any religion that loves death or leads to parents rejoicing when their children blow themselves up is surely of the Devil -- however you conceive of the Devil. Whether he is a man in a red suit with horns and a tail, a fallen spirit being, or simply the evil side of human nature hardly matters. In all cases Islam is clearly anti-life and only the Devil or his disciples could rejoice in that.

And there surely could be few lower forms of human behaviour than to give abuse and harm in return for help. The compassionate practices of countries with Christian traditions have led many such countries to give a new home to Muslim refugees and seekers after a better life. It's basic humanity that such kindness should attract gratitude and appreciation. But do Muslims appreciate it? They most commonly show contempt for the countries and societies concerned. That's another sign of Satanic influence.

And how's this for demonic thinking?: "Asian father whose daughter drowned in Dubai sea 'stopped lifeguards from saving her because he didn't want her touched and dishonoured by strange men'

Islamic terrorism isn’t a perversion of Islam. It’s the implementation of Islam. It is not a religion of the persecuted, but the persecutors. Its theology is violent supremacism.

And where Muslims tell us that they love death, the great Christian celebration is of the birth of a baby -- the monogenes theos (only begotten god) as John 1:18 describes it in the original Greek -- Christmas!

No wonder so many Muslims are hostile and angry. They have little companionship from women and not even any companionship from dogs -- which are emotionally important in most other cultures. Dogs are "unclean"

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here